Dennis Sewell - The BBC and Bias Beyond News

[Teddy Bear]

A 22+ year veteran at the BBC writes a report relating to individual issues of bias he observes over that period, and what he sees as the reasons for it.

It was published just about a year ago but I just came across it.

It's too long to post here in it's entirety so I will just post the introduction and a strong recommendation to read the rest via the link.

A Question of Attitude
The BBC and bias beyond news
Dennis Sewell
©
The New Culture Forum 2012

About the author
Dennis Sewell is an author, broadcaster and contributing editor of the Spectator. He spent more than twenty years on the staff of BBC News, where he presented Radio 4’s Talking Politics, BBC World Service’s Politics UK, worked as a reporter for BBC 2’s Newsnight and was an award-winning documentary maker.
His latest book is The Political Gene (Picador, 2010)

A Question of Attitude: The BBC and bias beyond news

Like its chairman, I think the BBC should be biased.
As Lord Patten declared at his pre-appointment hearing at the House of Commons, ‘I think it should be biased in favour of tolerant, civilised pluralism.’
Most of us, I believe, would concur with that.

Conservatives, on the whole, tend to believe that the BBC has other, more unwelcome biases. While still in opposition, the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said the BBC needed to address its ‘innate liberal bias’. Today, it would be hard to find a Conservative politician, activist or ordinary grass-roots member who does not think the BBC is biased, either politically or culturally. The feeling on the centre-right of politics is near universal, as five minutes spent looking at the websites of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator or Conservative Home will confirm.

This sentiment is not new. I spent more than 22 years working for BBC News. Right from the beginning, I found myself having to reassure my friends from business, the City or the professions that I was not spending every working day among communists. I would explain to them how painstaking we all were at the BBC to ensure that every word we uttered was self-policed for impartiality, and how significant time might be spent debating with colleagues over whether ‘admit’, ‘claim’ or plain ‘say’ was the
mot juste in a particular story.

I took the joshing of my friends lightly, but one day was rather brutally mugged by reality.

At a Conservative Party Conference, a stranger approached, inspected my ID and, putting his face uncomfortably close to my own, asked: ‘Why should I, on pain of imprisonment, be forced to pay bastards like you to peddle a philosophy that represents everything in life I despise?’ As it turned out, he was not an escaped lunatic, and, despite being at party conference, he was not drunk. He was the CEO of a well-known company.

It would be hard to overstate the elemental force of this man’s rage. His face grew puce, his words were spat out like venom. It was either cut-and-run, or get to the bottom of it. Was it the BBC’s reporting of the Israel–Palestine conflict? Was it Europe? Was it robust and challenging questioning styles? No, he couldn’t care less about Israel; he wasn’t particularly Eurosceptic; Jeremy Paxman was ‘sound’ and John Humphrys practically a soulmate. Instead, he produced a litany of offences allegedly perpetrated by BBC colleagues in arts, drama, documentary and religious programmes – all areas beyond news and current affairs.

Each individual beef, ranging from the status of the family to issues in contemporary art, was thoroughly thought through and cogently argued. He gave examples of how a particular tone of voice or an unwarranted assumption had distressed him. It was, he concluded, ‘chiefly a question of attitude’. I returned to London wondering whether some of those people working on floors I did not stop at in the lift might be letting the side down.

The BBC tends to ascribe all talk of bias to mischief making by its media rivals, and particularly to newspaper groups with extensive television or internet interests. Yet both Director-General Mark Thompson and Director of BBC Vision George Entwistle have made speeches in which they gleefully attest that their private polling tells them that readers of the Daily Mail and The Times turn out to be more supportive of the BBC than readers of other newspapers.

While I can appreciate the rhetorical allure of that point, it surely points up a logical flaw: if support for the BBC is lower among readers of papers without a dog in the fight, then perhaps that talk of bias is not entirely synthetic or newspaper generated.

The BBC is currently going through a period of enormous change and adjustment. It will shortly have a new director-general. Yet while the Corp-oration feels the pain of learning to live with a net reduction in income, many Conservatives – both in Parliament and in the country – think it has got off far too lightly.

Unlike his predecessors as Conservative leader, David Cameron did not ratchet up the anti-BBC rhetoric while in opposition. Some say that this was a cunning ruse to help him change the party’s image and get him elected, and is only being extended because of the special situation of coalition. Many Conservatives hope that he will take a tougher line if he obtains an overall majority next time.

The Mayor of London, who is highly attuned to sentiments of the Conservative grass roots, recently called upon the BBC to appoint a Tory as director-general.

The 2010 British Social Attitudes Survey reported that, for the first time since 1991, more people in Britain identified themselves as Conservative supporters than as Labour. Later that year, the Tories almost won a parliamentary majority, garnering a little over 36 per cent of the popular vote. As recently as March this year, the party was standing at 40 percent in the polls.

For the purposes of this paper, I am going to take the smallest of these figures – the 32 per cent of Britons who identified themselves as Conservative supporters in the British Social Attitudes Survey – as a proxy for a section of society that shares what might broadly be termed a centre-right, as opposed to a left-liberal, outlook or worldview.

That number possibly understates the size of such a group. If so, that is all to the good: in this area it is generally best to leave things understated, in order to minimize the scope for nit-picking. But wherever one makes the slice, it is undeniable that, taken together, big-C Conservatives and little-c conservatives represent a hefty chunk of the BBC’s audience and need to be attended to.

My aim in this paper is to explore some of the territory beyond news in which perceptions of political and cultural bias are formed. My hope is that such an exploration will help ‘the 32 per cent’ understand the BBC a little better, and the BBC to see more clearly what it is about its output that so frequently gets the ordinary conservative’s goat